“I’m very glad that I didn’t start writing in my 20s,” says author Kit de Waal. “Some people have got what it takes to write profound things in their 20s. People like Sally Rooney. But I am not that person.”
We’re speaking over Zoom in late April. Behind her, a tangle of houseplant limbs stretches over the exposed brick walls of her home. It’s a busy time for De Waal. Not only has she just released a new novel, The Best of Everything, but she’s currently chairing the Women’s Prize for Fiction judging panel. And tonight, she’s speaking at the Cambridge Literary Festival with fellow judge, novelist, and journalist Diana Evans.
While all this makes it tricky to imagine a time when De Waal wasn’t immersed in the literary world, she didn’t attempt writing until her mid-40s. And it wasn’t until age 56, following a varied career in family and criminal law, that she published her debut smash-hit novel, My Name is Leon. However, De Waal sees this relatively late start as a gift.
“In my 20s, I definitely believed there was right and wrong, and good and bad, and no shades of grey,” she says. “Now, I think most of life is shades of grey, and it enables me to be more empathetic, to realise how much I don’t know about the world, and to write from a better place. Loads of people can do it when they’re younger. But I definitely wouldn’t have.”
“I've always been someone who wants to feel that I'm doing what I want with my life. If that makes me money, that's great. If it doesn't, that's also great”
One of five siblings, De Waal grew up in the Birmingham suburb of Moseley. Her Irish mother worked as a foster carer, registered childminder, and nurse, while her father was a bus driver from St Kitts. And contrary to what you might expect, her story doesn’t begin with a childhood passion for reading.
“I never read a book outside of school,” De Waal says. “Except for the Bible, which I had to do because my mother was a Jehovah’s Witness. And I can honestly say that put me off reading completely.”
But during a desperate time in her early 20s, De Waal found comfort in literature. “I had a really bad time”, she remembers. “I had chronic insomnia, I was very anxious, and I just started reading because I couldn’t sleep. But that was it, then, I was addicted.”
Over the next two decades, De Waal slowly worked her way through the classics. “Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, Edith Wharton – the usual suspects. I absolutely loved them,” she says, but the thought of putting pen to paper herself never crossed her mind.
“The only writers I knew were dead. And apart from Enid Blyton, they were dead men. And white. And posh,” De Waal wrote in The Guardian back in 2018. “Even when I began to read widely in my 20s, it was still a case of: if you can’t see it, you can’t be it. No one from my background – poor, black and Irish – wrote books. It just wasn’t an option.”
Careerwise, De Waal started working for the Crown Prosecution Service after a string of jobs that included backing singer and massage therapist. She describes her role at the CPS as “a lawyer’s dog’s body” – “I did the work that, normally, a qualified lawyer would do, but I wasn’t qualified,” she explains.
When two prosecutors from the CPS left to establish their own practice, De Waal went with them, transitioning from criminal to family law. Next, she began working for social services (“I fancied a change,” she says), before becoming a magistrate. “I thought that would be interesting: someone from my background, my colour, being a magistrate.”
“I’ve never had a plan,” De Waal says when I ask about early career goals. “I’m just a yes person. So, if someone says, ‘Do you want to do this?’ I go, ‘That’d be interesting.’ But that’s the limit of my plotting and planning.
“My life has been one of following my interests. I’ve always been someone who wants to feel that I’m doing what I want with my life. If that makes me money, that’s great. If it doesn’t, that’s also great. But I have to be doing what I want to do.”
“I thought I’d be good, I’ve got to be honest, because I was such a good reader. But I was rubbish!”
After adopting her second child in her mid-40s, DeWaal decided to press pause on her career – and it was during this period that she first began writing. “I just thought, ‘I’ll have a go,’” she says. “I certainly never thought it would be a career.” And while her first foray into storytelling was “very casual”, she was surprised by how challenging it was. “I thought I’d be good, I’ve got to be honest, because I was such a good reader,” she smiles. “But I was rubbish!”
I ask her what it was about those early attempts that wasn’t hitting the mark, to which she replies, “Oh my God, how long have you got? I was crap. I was reading my work back and thinking, ‘There’s a better way to do this and I don’t know it.’ You often hear people say, ‘Show don’t tell.’ And I was like, ‘What the hell does that mean?’”
To find out what her writing was lacking, De Waal went back to her favourite authors – Graham Greene, Gustave Flaubert, and Sebastian Barry, to name a few – and began deconstructing their work. She recalls first reading Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in her 20s as a particularly formative experience, one that helped her to “understand the power of writing.”
She says, “That book made me feel that I was in the 1800s, just outside of Rouen, in a little village. What the f*** do I know about a middle-class French doctor? Nothing, but all of a sudden, I’m in his head, I’m in his heart.
“Fast-forward to my 40s, when I started trying to be Gustave Flaubert, and failing and failing, because I knew I was not doing that thing that I read when I was 25,” De Waal continues. “That was good, this was bad. And so my aim was entirely to be that good. I wanted to make someone feel like, ‘Oh my god, I’m in that person’s head,’ and I knew I wasn’t doing it. So it was certainly not overnight. It was very gradually that I crept closer and closer to being the writer I wanted to be.”
“It was absolutely wonderful to have something I thought was good be something that someone else thought was good”
Part of this gradual improvement involved enrolling in a creative writing MA at Oxford Brookes University at age 52. “It was a line in the sand,” De Waal says. “I’m investing a year of my life, I’ve got my kids in childcare, I’ve spent a lot of money, and I’m going to do a lot of work.”
And do a lot of work she did. De Waal describes herself as “the Swiss Army Knife of pupils”, packing everything she could conceivably need and more for class. Before term started, she’d read and marked up every book on the primary reading list, plus every book on the supplemental reading list.
“I just thought, ‘When that bloke with the mortarboard starts asking questions, I’m going to know the answers,’” she says. “Because it was my one shot at going to university, at getting to be a better writer. So I was like, ‘I’m going to milk this thing until I’ve got out of it what I want.’”
At university, De Waal found her literary tribe – “Until then, I’d never found anyone as passionate as I was, and many of those people are still my friends now” – and she developed her ability to write on demand. “We would have lecturers say things like ‘500 words on a grey chair in a storm, I’ll be back in an hour.’ And you would have to write to order. It was a brilliant way to bring out whatever was inside of you.”
It was during a similar exercise that De Waal first wrote something that glimmered with the potential she was looking for. The prompt was ‘the taste of death’, which emerged from a story the lecturer told about Ernest Hemingway witnessing a bullfight. In response, De Waal wrote a passage about a dying chef who’s writing a secret recipe to help his wife keep their restaurant open after he’s gone.
“I knew it was good. I just knew it was,” De Waal says, so she entered it into a flash fiction competition run by Fish Publishing. It was included in the honorary mentions and published in their 2011 anthology. “It was absolutely wonderful to have something I thought was good be something that someone else thought was good. That really was a massive change for me.”
“It was very, very hard work to write them, and it was very, very hard when they didn’t get anywhere”
In the following years, De Waal continued writing short stories, which garnered a steady stream of accolades – including the Costa Short Story Award’s Second Prize in 2014 for ‘The Old Man & the Suit’. She also wrote two crime novels but was unable to get either published.
“It was very, very hard work to write them, and it was very, very hard when they didn’t get anywhere,” she recalls. “You know, proper disappointment, heartbreak – the rejection was brutal for both.”
Initially, De Waal decided that novel writing simply wasn’t for her. “I just thought, ‘Okay, short stories it is, because, obviously, I haven’t got whatever it takes to write a novel.’” But soon, something motivated her to try again, albeit with a different approach.
De Waal describes her previous two attempts as “guns and geezers, a murder, a nightclub, two guys fighting in an alley.” But this time around, she said, “I’m going to do the thing I really care about. The thing that’s scary: the small story.”
The result was My Name is Leon, a tale of a mixed-race nine-year-old boy set against the backdrop of the 1981 Handsworth riots. It was published in 2016 following an auction between six different publishing houses. It went on to be shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and was crowned the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Today, it’s part of the GCSE curriculum.
“I didn’t know the publishing world. I didn’t know about books taking off and becoming bestsellers. And when it did become so big, well,” she trails off. “I’m still shocked. Still really, really surprised that people are reading that small book about a small boy and a small time in his life.”
“We need the Women's Prize to be championing women's fiction, to be standing up for, and shining a spotlight on, women”
Since Leon, as she refers to her debut, De Waal has gone from strength to strength, growing in confidence as a writer. Her subsequent works include the 2018 novel The Trick to Time, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and a memoir, Without Warning & Only Sometimes, which was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the Irish Book Awards.
Her new novel, The Best of Everything, tells the story of Paulette, whose life is rocked by the sudden death of the man she loves, and the family she finds in the wake of this loss. It’s been described by Bernardine Evaristo as, “A profoundly compassionate novel of devastating power.”
Alongside writing, De Waal has become a champion for other authors. Using some of the advance money from Leon, she set up a fully-funded creative writing scholarship at Birkbeck, University of London, for students who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford to go. She also edited Common People, a 2019 anthology of working-class writers. And now, she’s chairing the judging panel for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, an experience she describes as “the best book group in the world” and “a masterclass in what women are thinking today.”
“Because we’re not there yet,” De Waal says when I ask why the Women’s Prize is so important in today’s climate. “One day, in the mythical future, when women do not have to fight for space, when there is no misogyny, when women have equal pay, when women are not attacked, then, we won’t need the Women’s Prize. But until that day comes, if it ever comes, we need the Women’s Prize to be championing women’s fiction, to be standing up for, and shining a spotlight on, women.”
“Don’t think you haven’t got something to say. Even if you’re thinking about it, it’s because you have something to say”
De Waal is also keen to encourage older adults, who’ve never been able to pursue their passion for writing, to pick up a pen. She says that, for some, later life can offer more freedom for creative pursuits – perhaps you’re no longer working or your children have left home – but she also acknowledges this isn’t the case for everyone.
“Life’s never been more difficult,” De Waal says. “There are many people with two or three jobs, who are caring for an older parent and younger children, studying really hard to try and get ahead, dealing with mental health issues or disabilities. There are so many pulls on us these days. It’s no surprise that people find it very difficult to find time to write.”
When De Waal says “time to write”, she also means “the mental space to write”. “Because let’s say you’ve got two hours after your second job. You could write,” she explains. “But maybe you’re knackered. Maybe you can’t even say your name you’re so tired or you just want to get a sandwich. Just because you’ve got two hours, it doesn’t mean you’ve got two hours to write.”
Despite these challenges, De Waal implores wannabe writers not to be discouraged. Her advice: start small and try to write a sentence every day. “Sometimes, you might think, ‘I can’t devote an hour to writing. I can’t do 500 words. Therefore, I won’t bother.’ But 100 words a day adds up to a novel in a year. One sentence ends up being a novel in maybe 18 months,” she says.
Some writing, De Waal explains, doesn’t even need to happen at your desk. If you find yourself doing something unexciting at work (changing a bed is the example she uses), she suggests describing it in your mind in a kind of interior monologue.
“The sheet feels cool. The carpet feels sticky. The windows are fogged over. Whatever it is, learn to narrate your life,” she says. “Just increasing your vocabulary, increasing your connection with words, so the minute you get the chance to sit down and write, you’ve got some raw material to work with.”
And when you finally do find the time to write, try not to second-guess yourself, De Waal says. “Don’t think you can’t do it. Don’t think you haven’t got something to say. Even if you’re thinking about it, it’s because you have something to say.
“No one has to see it, and it won’t be brilliant the first time around. The first time you make a roast dinner, it’s probably not very nice, because it’s a hard thing to pull off. But the more you do it, the better you get. And don’t read your favourite author and think, ‘Well, I can’t be her, so I’m not going to do it.’ Because she wasn’t her when she started writing. So start where you are and do it.”
Are you inspired by Kit De Waal’s story? Or have you already tried your hand at writing in later life? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.